January 26, 2012 
It’s weird. I’m 24-years-old, and I feel like I’m still a kid. I’m broke, I’m still in school, and I don’t have any real significant achievements to be proud of. Sure, I travelled for a year and a bit (AUSTRALIA AND INDONESIA REPRESENT), and it was definitely an amazing experience for a lot of different reasons, but the entire time I was acutely aware of the fact my life was essentially on “pause.”
Not that I'm complaining or anything.
I started to consider my options. Apparently it didn’t matter that I had pretty much sold my soul to the devil in order to kick academic butt during my undergraduate degree; the best kind of job I could get was slinging various types of beverages. Seeing as I am a hardcore English nerd, however, a career in said beverage slinging was likely to prove unsatisfying. And call me crazy, but I wanted a job that paid more than minimum wage. AND I knew that as much as I loved working with kids, teaching wasn’t for me. So what’s a girl to do?
NO.
I needed to be more qualified. Hark, a realization! Grad school was the answer! But what grad school? And what program? I didn’t want just a Masters or PhD in English, because I have parents that have graduate degrees up the ying yang and it got them… into a lot of debt and misery and not much else (so admittedly I’m a bit jaded about the whole getting-a-stable-career-at-a-university thing). I wanted a degree that would get me a JOB. Financial stability! From a career that I enjoyed! Yes! That was the dream!
So I researched. And I researched and I researched and I researched. I then applied to many, many different programs, and I stressed about writing various “Statements of Purpose” (which I’ve come to realize are basically total bullsh*t on paper), and then at the last minute–literally about a week before the application deadline–I remembered something one of my profs had told me at Mount A. It was almost like divine intervention: in a moment of absolute desperation, as application deadlines rushed ever closer and I still felt doomed to a lifetime of beverage slinging, I suddenly remembered a moment with my medieval goddess-like professor (I idolized her, what can I say). In a meeting throughout which I gushed my desire to write an essay that would please her, she mentioned offhand how Trent University had recently developed a unique graduate program that might interest me in the future. That moment cemented itself in my memory, and came to me when I needed it the most.
It's like T-Pain KNEW.
An English Masters degree, but in Public Texts? With a collaborative degree option at Humber, where I’d receive practical training in the publishing industry? AND the chance to do an internship? Where I could POSSIBLY get hired in the future, and if not at least I’d have something KICK-ASS to put on my resume, thus exponentially increasing my employability factor??? SOLD.
So I applied. And I’m here (obviously, duh), learning something new everyday… sometimes it’s related to my courses, a lot of the time it’s related to who I am as a person and what people/life are/is like in general. But that’s a whole other blog post, and I’m struggling for material at this point. Ergo, Busby! Sing me out:
Amanda Miller
doctorsara
dontpanictrent
Great post, love! I like what you’re got goin’ on over here. Also, T-Pain made me giggle. xoxo
INDO ONE LOVE. Also, good job Rogers. I wish T-Pain was there to tell me what to do, besides the greatest love song in the world…
Great post! What’s ‘ying yang’?
perhaps you should direct this question to a trusted adult
Thanks…I needed some ABBA today. Unrepetant cheese rejuvenates the soul.